Read the previous entry in the series here.
Read the next entry in the series here.

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After good news makes its way from Detozi to Reyall, “Shopping” begins with Hest confronting his father, the Trader Finbok. Hest recalls the attack he suffered as his father rebukes and upbraids him for his sloppiness with Alise, bidding him retrieve his wife as a means of securing Elderling goods from far up the Rain Wild river. The Trader Finbok relates information he has come to possess about the Tarman and the keepers’ expedition, and Hest is surprised to be presented with a line of thought he had not considered. He maneuvers his father somewhat, and the Trader Finbok explicates the situation with the keepers and the Councils in Trehaug and Cassarick in more detail, laying out what would be the advantageous position for the Finboks to take. Hest considers messages he, himself, had sent, following the implications thereof, and his father directs him to book passage.

The argument the directive would provoke is forestalled by the entrance of Hest’s mother, Sealia, who is described in detail as she takes Hest in hand, to his father’s annoyance. Hest turns over the implications of his mother’s interference in his mind and sides, surprisingly, with his father. Sealia bustles off to make arrangements, and Hest receives further instructions from his father before heading out with his mother on her intended shopping trip.

Their progress to and through the main market in Bingtown is detailed, and Hest muses on his situation as they proceed. His reverie is interrupted by the sight of his assailant, and he urges his mother onto a different route than she had intended. Thinking himself safe, Hest presses his mother to return home, and he calls for tea upon arrival. When it is delivered, Hest finds himself poisoned, his assailant reminding him of his demands and the price for failing to meet them.

I have been accused, on no few occasions and not without substantial merit, of having a lascivious sense of humor. Put more plainly, I like dirty jokes, and I make them (too?) often, so much so that there are online communities in which pointing out or making innuendo is taken as typifying me. Consequently, when Hest makes a crude joke about his and his father’s genital endowments, it attracted my attention. Frankly, it’s a kind of joke I would make–and a kind of joke I have made, more than once. It does seem out of place, admittedly, both in-milieu (it’s not the sort of thing usually associated with the Bingtown Traders as previously depicted in the novels, nor with prevailing depictions of the genteel merchant princes of the early America I still maintain Bingtown evokes and echoes) and in a readerly sense; only one other overt example comes to mind for me at the moment, and it is also marked in the text as being unusual. Again, I don’t mind the joke, but it stands out, and, given the broader context of Hobb’s work, I think it has to serve to reinforce that readers should not like Hest–and that his father’s not a whole lot better, if he is at all.

I note also another bit of humor, subtler and far more pointed, at work in the present chapter. Readers of the Realm of the Elderlings novels will doubtlessly be familiar with a pair of assassins north of Bingtown, Skilled servants of the Six Duchies, Chade Fallstar and FitzChivalry Farseer. While the novels do not shy away from the nature of their work for their kingdom, they also go to great lengths to humanize the pair of them and to make them sympathetic, something aided, certainly, by positioning Fitz as the narrator in more cases than not. The assassin and enforcer that has been assigned to handle Hest is not nearly so kindly portrayed, which comes across to me as a particularly morbid bit of humor. Hest, being more of a stereotype than many other characters in the Realm of the Elderlings novels, gets a more stereotypical treatment than most do, as well. Admittedly, the humor’s less funny than it is sardonic, and there are problems with the use of stereotypes, generally, but that both are true does not mean the humor is not present in the text, the sardonic no less than the vulgar.

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